Ivy waited until the third bell rang.
The campus shifted then—just enough. Students moved between electives and study hours. The hallways emptied. Security spells lowered across the third-floor library wing for twenty-three minutes. That was all she needed.
She entered through the east stairwell, quiet shoes, hood up.
The restricted archive room wasn't locked by keys or passwords—it was sealed by pattern. You had to move the right way to enter. A ripple-encoded barrier would reject anyone who hadn't passed through the mirrored orchard or survived a glyph surge.
Ivy had done both.
The door shimmered as she stepped forward.
It opened with a soft ripple tone, like an old chord humming through glass.
Inside, it smelled like wet ink, crushed leaves, and silence.
The Archive of Forgotten Students was a long room filled with angled files, rune-tagged documents, and a shallow mirror lake underfoot. Reflections moved even when you stood still.
Ivy walked to the back, where the oldest ledgers were kept—bound in leather stitched with gold thread that sometimes looked like veins.
Her glyphs tingled.
She reached for a faded green volume marked:
Student Register: 2B | Classified Exits
It opened with a sigh.
The names on the pages were formal, cold.
Students who had been removed. Some expelled. Some erased. Some lost.
Halfway through, one page was smeared with what looked like ash. Her eyes scanned the names—until her fourth mark flickered faintly over the paper.
The ash lifted. Gently.
And beneath it, one name rewrote itself in silver fire:
Mirelen Crownborne
Her breath hitched.
It wasn't a memory—not yet. But it was something more than a name. It pulled.
When her fingers brushed the ink, a shudder went through her glyphs. Suddenly:
She was barefoot in snow.
She was standing before the Mirror Crown.
She was screaming something.
Not a word. A plea.
"Take it. Take me. Seal me—don't let me remember what I did."
She gasped—and the memory snapped away.
---
Outside, dusk had settled low and blue across the quad.
Ivy walked out of the archive wing and found Arlo waiting near the courtyard fountain—hood down, arms folded.
He didn't ask where she'd been.
She didn't pretend to lie.
Instead, she walked straight to him, stopped, and said:
"How many versions of me have you seen?"
Arlo blinked.
Her voice didn't waver. "Not just this one. All of them."
He looked away.
"Three," he said.
She wasn't sure what she expected.
Not that.
"Three?" she echoed.
Arlo's jaw clenched. "Three versions that woke the glyph. Three attempts to seal the Mirror Crown. You're the fourth."
"And the others?"
"One destroyed the Veil and burned herself out. One became something the Council couldn't control—so they erased her. And one…"
He hesitated.
"One chose to forget," Ivy said.
He nodded.
"I saw it," she whispered. "In the archive. Her name's still there."
"She asked us to wipe it. Not out of fear. Out of guilt."
"What did she do?"
He didn't answer.
"What did I do?" she said.
Still silence.
Ivy stepped back, the ripple whispering faintly in her ear.
She turned toward the west-facing mirror at the fountain's edge. Her reflection trembled—not with magic, but memory.
"Show me," she whispered.
The glyphs along her skin sparked.
"Show me the version that stayed."
---
End of Chapter 25